1 Photo
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Judith Miller headed the Cairo bureau for The New York Times, was the newspaper’s Paris correspondent, served as a news editor and deputy bureau chief in Washington, D.C., and authored five books.
But her name is most associated with just two things: her pre-war reporting on the U.S. intelligence community’s belief that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and the 85 days she spent in jail in 2005 for refusing to give up a source.
Her most recent book is “The Story: A Reporter’s Journey,” which she will discuss on Wednesday, April 12, at Stony Brook Southampton for the college campus’s Writers Speak series of free author talks, open to the public. Ms. Miller, a part-time resident of Sag Harbor, also is ready to expound on the role of the press, and its relationship to the White House in the age of Donald Trump.
“The Story” is an investigative journalist’s memoir, revealing the difficulties of reporting in the Arab world, and in the U.S. capital. She offers insights on how U.S. intelligence got Iraq so wrong, and she gives the inside story on why she went to jail to protect Scooter Libby, the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, a source to whom she had promised anonymity. She eventually testified, but only after she was convinced that Mr. Libby was not under duress when he freed her from her obligation to protect his identity.
In a recent interview, Ms. Miller acknowledged that she has become the poster child for the pre-war reporting that was later revealed to be based on faulty intelligence. She said critics can say she made mistakes—but they can’t say that she lied or allowed herself to be lied to.
She pointed to something former Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger said: “If the sources are wrong, you’re going to be wrong.”
“One of the things I was accused of is lack of skepticism,” she said. “There is a saying in journalism that I’m sure you’ve probably heard: ‘If your mother says she loves you, check it out.’ That’s always been my motto.”
She pointed to the oft-repeated phrase that came about after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq—“They lied, people died”—which she credits with helping Barack Obama earn the Democratic nomination in 2008 rather than Hillary Clinton, who had supported the war.
Critics of the Iraq War insist that members of the U.S. intelligence community lied about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction, she said, while in reality they just got it wrong. “Yeah, they got it wrong—horribly, terribly wrong—in some cases for reasons that revealed shocking bad tradecraft, like intellectually discarding information that contradicted your thesis.”
She noted that she had reported on Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein since 1976. “I had seen him lie consistently over the years, so I was persuaded as someone who had been to and worked in Iraq, that he was still hiding something. So I had no reason to doubt that the intelligence analysts were correct. I shared their view.”
Ms. Miller said it wasn’t only the intelligence community and the Bush administration that were accused of deliberately lying: It was also the press. “I was a liar, [Times] correspondent Michael Gordon was a liar. We were either liars or the dumbest, most incompetent journalists on the planet, and the least skeptical. And, of course, if you look at my record, and you look at the stories I’ve broken on all sides, and you look at the prizes, you think, ‘Gee, that’s kind of hard to believe.’”
Democrats insisting that members of the press deliberately lied contributed to the de-legitimizing of the press as an institution that is needed to question power, she said. “So, we did it to ourselves, in effect. We’ve done it to ourselves, or allowed that to happen, for partisan political purposes.”
One of the reasons she wrote “The Story,” which was published in 2015, was to defend the need for a skeptical and independent press, and defend its reliability, she explained.
“I think the press, sometimes, is too hard on itself,” Ms. Miller said.
Members of the media are not obligated to beat themselves up, or to pillory one another, when the press gets a story wrong, she said. “The answer to getting something wrong is getting it right. Going back, looking at the story, looking at what we did get wrong, filling in the blanks that led us to come to an erroneous conclusion.
“And that’s what I tried to also do in ‘The Story.’ And that’s what led me to the discovery that my testimony on Scooter Libby was probably wrong, because I unearthed more information—because that’s what reporters are supposed to do. That’s what journalism is supposed to do.
“Getting stuff wrong is not a sin. Failing to correct the record is.”
She explained that Mr. Libby got his license to practice law back, because in “The Story” she had retracted some of her testimony in light of new information. “For me, that’s exactly what journalism should do,” she said. “It should be about setting the record straight, no matter how long it takes you to do it.”
She said that during her time in jail for contempt of court for refusing to reveal her source, “most reporters most publications supported me, and I was deeply grateful for that support. I got hundreds and hundreds of letters, and many of them from journalists and organizations—and it made a big difference. But the people who were out to get me because I had, quote, ‘brought them the war on Iraq,’ that didn’t stop throughout the time I was in jail.”
Since 2008, Ms. Miller has been a Fox News contributor, a position that she has also caught flak for, considering the cable news channel’s conservative leanings.
Explaining her decision to work for Fox, Ms. Miller said, “At the time, Fox News had more viewers than every other cable new channel combined. ... So if I want my voice and my point of view to be heard, I’m going to be on Fox News.”
She noted that Mr. Trump has been a boon for MSNBC and CNN’s ratings, and said the channels should thank their lucky stars for him.
That’s not to say she is a Trump supporter.
“Reporters got very upset when he called us ‘the opposition,’ and never mind ‘enemy of the people ...’” she said of Mr. Trump. “You can’t use terms like ‘America first’ and ‘enemy of the people’ if you have any sense of history. You just don’t do it—you don’t go there. But he doesn’t have any of that.
“I’m just constantly struck by his lack of education. In my lifetime, we have never had a president like this one. Even though I’ve interviewed him, and I kind of like him personally. I mean, when you’re with him one on one, he’s very different. You wouldn’t say he’s racist, sexist, homophobic, or etcetera, etcetera. But what comes out of his mouth and the policy are all of those things—and that’s ugly, and I can’t remember someone who lands successfully on that kind of ugliness.
“So, I’m really very disheartened by what I see. I am, in a weird way, apolitical. I’m not a Republican or a Democrat—I’m a political independent. I’ve voted for both Republicans and Democrats, and I’ve covered both. But I’ve never seen anything like this. This is unique.”
Ms. Miller admitted that some things Mr. Trump says strike her as being amazingly honest and provocative, in a good way, making people think. “But there are other things—and it’s just been terrifying,” she said. “So, I may be a reporter, but I’m also a citizen. What you’re hearing is my reaction to him as a citizen, rather than as a reporter.”
So how does she feel about a president who called news that is demonstrably true, “fake news”?
“That’s part of his tactics,” she said. “That’s a tactic, one of the ways in which he attempts to delegitimize us. And it won’t work.”
In the short term, the tactic may get results, she acknowledged. “In the long run, he’s going to be judged by whether or not he can get the economy to grow again, whether or not more people in his cabinet are forced to leave for impropriety, or even ostensibly treasonous behavior, like in the case of Mike Flynn.”
People will get a chance to judge Mr. Trump on his record, rather than his rhetoric, she said. “More people will, I hope, come to an enlightened decision one way or another about him. As a citizen, I want him to succeed. I don’t want anything bad to happen to the country. I think the path that he’s chosen is ill-advised. I don’t share his budgetary choices, his outlook on how to get the country moving again.”
She said she sees where critics of the media are coming from, as far as how politicized the press has become, and said it is hard to argue that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, National Public Radio and universities are not the liberal elite.
“They’re going to do what they’re going to do,” she said of Mr. Trump and like-minded critics of the media. “We’ve made it easy for them to demonize us. They’re going to do what they’re going to do, and I think our response has to be to just do what we need to do, which is our jobs. Hold them accountable. Show the many, many ways in which they are not draining the swamp—they are part of it. Show the extent to which ... the budgetary choices they make contradict even what Donald Trump said he was going to do. He talked about providing for women’s health care, and yet they’re going to de-fund Planned Parenthood. They’re going to take away money for biomed research.”
Regarding investigative reporting, she said it’s needed now more than ever.
“Another trend that really worries me is, because this kind of reporting is so expensive and time consuming to do, there’s less and less of it. And that’s also a real problem, because a lot of what’s going on now, masquerading as investigative reporting, is not. It’s not investigative reporting to get a staffer on a House intelligence committee to tell you what’s going to be in a hearing on Monday, you know, three days in advance. That’s not investigative reporting. That’s ordinary reporting.”
Ms. Miller emphasized that she is not denigrating White House correspondents.
“It’s good that they’re asking the tough questions,” she said. “But let’s not confuse that with unearthing the kind of information that’s going to make people say, ‘Wow, I did not know that about cabinet member X or the president.”Judith Miller will speak at Stony Brook Southampton, 39 Tuckahoe Road, Southampton, in the Radio Lounge on the second floor of Chancellors Hall on Wednesday, April 12, at 7 p.m. Admission is free and anyone is welcome. A brief reception will precede the event at 6:30 p.m. For more information, call 631-632-5030 or visit stonybrook.edu/mfa.
